Author Archives: legallysociable

The difficulties of giving an old shopping mall a new Main Street

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Randhurst Mall, the first enclosed mall in the Chicago area, has received a facelift in recent years but it hasn’t gone perfectly:

By the time Casto bought Randhurst in 2007, the shopping center had long ago ceded primacy to larger, highwayside competition such as Schaumburg’s Woodfield Mall. Casto’s revamp, designed by the Beame Architectural Partnership of Coral Gables, Fla. and 505 Design of Boulder, Colo., removed the dome and the rest of the original mall’s core and replaced them with a traditional Main Street lined by an AMC movie theater, a Hampton Inn hotel, shops, restaurants and offices. A similar street leads in from the perimeter, creating a roughly T-shaped intersection with Main Street.The Main Street area — which Conroy said accounts for all the mall’s unleased space — gets the design basics right. Buildings, two to four stories high, frame both sides of the streets, creating the equivalent of an outdoor room. Benches, trellises and plant boxes add human scale. There’s synergy between the uses, and a link to the outdoors that some shoppers enjoy despite the obligatory piped-in music…

The many minuses begin with confusing internal roads, a predicament partly caused by big-box stores that don’t want their vast parking lots interrupted. In contrast to the modernist unity of Gruen’s design, the center’s outer buildings are an architectural mishmash. The postmodern Main Street buildings, clad in brick and metal, strain to achieve a sense of variety but offer little enticing detail. The street’s directory signs look cheap. The absence of apartments, either above the stores or in free-standing buildings, denies the merchants built-in customers who would drive activity 24/7…

Here’s hoping the signs breathe more life into Main Street and lead Randhurst to a future of greater density, a richer mix of uses and better connections to nearby neighborhoods. For now, its Main Street is essentially a lifestyle center in the middle of a mall — an urban fragment surrounded by the same old suburbia.

It sounds like the issue may be that the mall is trying to mix two styles that don’t necessarily go together: keeping big box anchors while also trying to create denser areas (that still are highly dependent on people driving to). Would it have been better to get rid of most or all of the old mall and start over with the lifestyle center rather than trying to mix the two? While this assessment focuses mainly on the design, there are also costs to keep in mind including keeping some parts of the mall open during renovation.

Perhaps things will change once the new Main Street area is leased. Perhaps there is a longer-term plan in the works that will better combine the two areas. But, I would suggest that even that carrying out the design of the new section perfectly doesn’t necessarily guarantee a good outcome for a suburban shopping mall.

Veblen: lawn = cow pasture

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In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen briefly tackles the lawn:

Everyday life affords many curious illustrations of the way in which the code of pecuniary beauty in articles of use varies from class to class, as well as of the way in which the conventional sense of beauty departs in its deliverances from the sense untutored by the requirements of pecuniary repute. Such a fact is the lawn, or the close-cropped yard or park, which appeals so unaffectedly to the taste of the Western peoples. It appears especially to appeal to the tastes of the well-to-do classes in those communities in which the dolicho-blond element predominates in an appreciable degree. The lawn unquestionably has an element of sensuous beauty, simply as an object of apperception, and as such no doubt it appeals pretty directly to the eye of nearly all races and all classes; but it is, perhaps, more unquestionably beautiful to the eye of the dolicho-blond than to most other varieties of men. This higher appreciation of a stretch of greensward in this ethnic element than in the other elements of the population, goes along with certain other features of the dolicho-blond temperament that indicate that this racial element had once been for a long time a pastoral people inhabiting a region with a humid climate. The close-cropped lawn is beautiful in the eyes of a people whose inherited bent it is to readily find pleasure in contemplating a well-preserved pasture or grazing land.

For the aesthetic purpose the lawn is a cow pasture; and in some cases today — where the expensiveness of the attendant circumstances bars out any imputation of thrift — the idyl of the dolicho-blond is rehabilitated in the introduction of a cow into a lawn or private ground. In such cases the cow made use of is commonly of an expensive breed. The vulgar suggestion of thrift, which is nearly inseparable from the cow, is a standing objection to the decorative use of this animal. So that in all cases, except where luxurious surroundings negate this suggestion, the use of the cow as an object of taste must be avoided. Where the predilection for some grazing animal to fill out the suggestion of the pasture is too strong to be suppressed, the cow’s place is often given to some more or less inadequate substitute, such as deer, antelopes, or some such exotic beast. These substitutes, although less beautiful to the pastoral eye of Western man than the cow, are in such cases preferred because of their superior expensiveness or futility, and their consequent repute. They are not vulgarly lucrative either in fact or in suggestion.

Public parks of course fall in the same category with the lawn; they too, at their best, are imitations of the pasture. Such a park is of course best kept by grazing, and the cattle on the grass are themselves no mean addition to the beauty of the thing, as need scarcely be insisted on with anyone who has once seen a well-kept pasture. But it is worth noting, as an expression of the pecuniary element in popular taste, that such a method of keeping public grounds is seldom resorted to. The best that is done by skilled workmen under the supervision of a trained keeper is a more or less close imitation of a pasture, but the result invariably falls somewhat short of the artistic effect of grazing. But to the average popular apprehension a herd of cattle so pointedly suggests thrift and usefulness that their presence in the public pleasure ground would be intolerably cheap. This method of keeping grounds is comparatively inexpensive, therefore it is indecorous.

Veblen is suggesting the lawn is a particular kind of status symbol, a connection to nature and a particular level of economic standing. Plus, this is a particular kind of Western urban adaptation of nature: have a little patch of grass and an animal, all standing in for a real connection to nature and a symbol of owning more expansive property. All of this sounds Bourdieuan: the lawn is a particular expression of class status and training.

The factors behind the rise of viral maps

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Here is a short look at how viral maps (“graphic, easy to read, and they make a quick popular point”) are put together by one creator:

When I need to find a particular data set, it’s often as straightforward as a search for the topic with the word “shapefile” or “gis” attached. There’s so much data just sitting on servers that if you can imagine it, it’s probably out there somewhere (often for free). Sometimes though, finding data requires a deeper search. A lot of government-provided data sits inside un-indexed data portals or clearinghouses. Depending on the quality of the portal, these can be tedious to sort through…

Simplicity and ease-of-use: Interactive maps are great, but I want the maps I make to be straightforward to read and understand. I don’t want viewers to have to figure out how to use the map; they should just be able to look at it and figure out what’s going on.

Projections: Typical web maps are limited to the Web Mercator projection. I don’t have any objection to Mercator in principle (in fact it’s brilliant for what it does), but I can’t in good conscience use it for maps at a continental or global scale. Sticking to static maps allows me to choose more appropriate projections for the data and region I’m depicting.

Uniformity: I want everyone who visits my maps to be presented with the same information. I don’t want some algorithm deciding that one visitor is shown a particular view while another visitor gets a different one.

These principles sound similar to what one would expect for any sort of online chart or infographic. There is plenty of data available online but it takes some skill in order to present the data clearly and then market the map to the appropriate audience.

Now that I think about it, it is a little surprising that it took this long for viral maps to catch on. First, the Internet makes a lot of geographic data easily accessible. Two, it is a visual medium and maps are essentially graphics (audio is another story). Third, geographic data seems to feed into a lot of hot-button topics of conversation these days as people of different races (residential segregation), cultural viewpoints (think the American South or the Bible Belt), education (think the Creative Callas looking for exciting urban neighborhoods), and other groupings tend to live in different places.

I wonder if the real story here isn’t the technology that makes mapping on a large-scale relatively easy today. GIS software has been around for a while but it generally pretty expensive and has a learning curve. Now, there are numerous websites that offer access to data and mapping capability (think the Census or Social Explorer). Shapefiles are used by a variety of local governments and researchers and can be downloaded. There are good freeware GIS programs like GeoDa. You need some bandwidth and computing power to get the data and crunch the numbers. All together, the pieces have now come together for more people to access, manipulate, and publish maps in a way that wasn’t possible even just 5 years ago.

 

Seeing the punk side of sociology at regional sociology meetings

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I read a review of a new sociology book Punk Sociology and wondered where I have seen the punk spirit in my discipline. The first thought that came to mind: regional sociological association meetings. But, first, a quick definition of the punk spirit from the review:

David Beer’s eulogy to the spirit of punk, and his commendable entreaty to his fellow sociologists to imbibe of its energy, inventiveness and iconoclasm…

He revisits two of my heroes from student days. Howard Becker has never really gone out of fashion – class acts rarely do – and C. Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination is still on the reading list, I would guess, for every newbie sociologist…

Crossing boundaries, using varieties of “foreign” cultural and social resources and analytical strategies, refusing to accept the dominant orthodoxies and avoiding slavish adherence to methodological shibboleths and theoretical dogma…well, of course, and we should all brush our teeth three times a day. The heritage of punk – nowadays focusing on the DIY/communitarian ideas that inform contemporary social movements such as Occupy and feminist/LGBT activism – is emphasised here, although much can be traced back to the ideas and practices of the punks’ bête noire, the hippy, and beyond.

Last academic year, a colleague and I took a group of our sociology students to a regional sociological association meeting for the day. Several things caught the attention of our undergrads. They liked seeing all of the possible topics sociologists cover. The types of papers ranged from thought experiments to full studies and students felt like they could generally understand what was going on and might be able to do such research and/or presentations themselves at some point. And, I remember they thought it was a fascinating look at who sociologists are – from how they present themselves to how they dress to what they study (and for what reasons) to how they interact with others – outside the classroom or our department office. Some of the sociologists seemed like free spirits who enjoyed what they studied and cared about addressing social ills.

Looking back, their comments seem to match my own experiences with regional meetings versus what I’ve seen attending the American Sociological Association meetings each year. These are different crowds: the ASA meetings attract the big names from the big schools. People are well-dressed and looking to engage in both intellectual and networking activities. The price is high: the meetings this year in San Francisco require a $200 conference registration fee, conference hotels running around $260 a night, and plane tickets that are $350+ from the Midwest and further east. Even the paper submission process reflects the status of the meetings: people have to submit 15-20 page papers, rather than the abstracts regional conferences often ask for.

The regional meetings are something different. There is a wide range of participants, from community colleges to research schools with more attendees from smaller and lower-status schools. From what I’ve seen, there is a more cooperative spirit among presenters and attendees. The dress is more relaxed, the standards of the research can vary, and the tone is more conversational than aspirational.

This is not to say the punk spirit of sociology isn’t present in high-status sociologists and high-status schools. However, the ASA meetings have a more professional, corporate atmosphere rather than an iconoclastic and anti-dogmatic approach that can mark other settings.

“A Brief History of Exploding Whales”

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Whales explode due to natural and man-made causes:

Sometimes beached whales erupt on their own, but sometimes humans blow them up first—as was the case in Florence, Oregon, in 1970. The town of Florence may have been the first to confront the dilemma that faces Trout River today.

Oregon officials thought their whale was too big to cut up or burn; they ended up hiring a highway engineer named Paul Thornton, from the state’s transportation department, to devise a plan. Thornton decided on using dynamite to blast the whale to bits. He figured that the blown-up pieces of blubber would scatter into the sea and whatever remained would be scavenged by birds and crabs…

In an obituary for Thornton, who died in October 2013, Elizabeth Chuck of NBC News describes what happened that day:

Bystanders were moved back a quarter of a mile before the blast, but were forced to flee as blubber and huge chunks of whale came raining down on them. Parked cars even further from the scene got smashed by pieces of dead whale. No one was hurt, but the small pieces of whale remains were flecked onto anyone in the area.

Though I wouldn’t have called it such at the time, this is the first “viral video” I remember discovering. And it would be years before it made it to YouTube. I remember in high school stumbling onto a fairly simple HTML page that had a video of this scene in Oregon. The news report was one of the strangest I had ever seen: people gathering to watch and then running as quickly as possible away from an exploding whale. I showed it to a number of people that had never seen anything like it. It isn’t exactly what viral videos are today – which tend to be more pop culture, catchy – but it was certainly unique and something quite foreign to most Midwesterners.

“On the Run” has an extra level of fieldwork immersion

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As publishers get excited about Alice Goffman’s upcoming book, sociologists say the fieldwork she undertook was quite immersive:

Ms. Goffman, who grew up in the Center City neighborhood of Philadelphia, said she took her first field notes as a teenager, recording observations about the Italian-American side of her family in South Philadelphia. By her sophomore year at Penn, she had moved full time to a mixed-income African-American neighborhood and was hanging out on a tough strip she calls 6th Street (all names and places in the book are disguised), fully immersing herself in local culture.

She abandoned her vegetarian diet, listened only to mainstream hip-hop and R&B, and adopted local “male attitudes, dress, habits, and even language,” as she puts it in a long appendix, describing her research methods. While drugs, and drug selling, pervaded the neighborhood, she did not use them, she writes, partly because “it hampered writing the field notes.”

By her own account, she lost most of her college friends, and struggled to complete her non-sociology requirements. Her thesis, advised by the noted ethnographer Elijah Anderson, won her a book contract from the University of Chicago (probably the first based on undergraduate research the publisher has ever signed, said Douglas Mitchell, its executive editor).

It may sound “absurd” now, Ms. Goffman said of her extreme immersion. “But I was trying to take the participant-observer approach as seriously as possible.”

Fieldwork is intended to get an in-depth view of real life through long periods of observation and interaction. This sounds like going the extra step to truly find out what is going on. I wonder if there isn’t another element involved: Goffman worked in areas that many, the public or academics, might consider dangerous for significant periods of time. In other words, even most sociologists, who tend to be interested in addressing social issues and using a variety of research methods, would not go as far as Goffman did. All of this makes me wonder how much we might have missed about the world because sociologists and others might not always be willing to go further.

American poor can buy cheap consumer goods but have a harder time purchasing important items

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I argued a ways back that Americans in poverty who own electronic goods illustrate the ubiquity of these goods in American life. Here is some evidence: the relative cost of consumer goods has dropped in recent decades while goods associated with leaving poverty, like higher education, have increased.

This is the tension at the core of modern impoverishment, which Annie Lowrey takes on in the New York Times today. The wonders of globalization, modern manufacturing, and ruthless Walmart-style supply-chain management have made the stuff we buy to fill our homes and time much cheaper, and as a result the poor now enjoy a level of material well-being that would have seemed unimaginable decades ago. The safety net is also infinitely more generous compared with the early 1960s, before Lyndon Johnson launched his war on poverty. Yet, because the prices of key services are spiraling out of control, the poor’s lot is still rather hopeless. The NYT captures it in this very, very long graph…

nyt_cost_graph

New York Times

Here’s what makes this trend so treacherous: Prices are rising on the very things that are essential for climbing out of poverty.

Another way to think about it might be that most Americans have a baseline of consumer goods they own. But, to move up in status or to purchase goods and services that can help one achieve mobility, more resources are needed.

It is too bad Internet service is not indexed here.

If one were to approach this from a Marxist point of view, perhaps the purpose of cheap goods is to keep people distracted while social life and economic life declines or is more exploitative. What is there to complain about what the typical person has a smartphone or a large LCD or LED TV and lots of viewing options?

Up and coming Chicago area rock band recycles suburban critiques?

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I read an interesting profile of The Orwells, a band from Elmhurst, Illinois that has been getting some radio play and whose major label debut comes out this summer. It sounds like a common story: four suburban kids put a band together during high school, find they have some talent which is affirmed by others, and are forgoing college to make a go at it in the music industry. Yet, I found this bit about their new album interesting:

They’ve got their major-label debut, “Disgraceland,” coming out in June; its cover, shot by Eddie O’Keefe, depicts a cookie-cutter post-war Elmhurst house.

From theorwells.com, here is the cover of the album:

A fairly typical home from the Chicago suburbs: split-level, a yard, detached garage in the back. Why the focus on critiquing the suburbs with the image and the title of the album? I listened to some of the band’s songs on SoundCloud and found the group doesn’t say much specific about the suburbs. (As for their sound, it is a mix of classic and modern rock.) Indeed, the theme of a number of the songs seems to be normal stuff for rock ‘n’ roll: how to get the girl. There is a song called “Mallrats” (with a music video filmed at Yorktown Mall) but its verses talk about a girl and the chorus has numerous repetitions of “la la la.” Of course, the new album may have more material about the suburbs.

Maybe this kind of explicit sexual desire is taboo in the suburbs. Maybe the suburbs are simply boring. But, I wonder if this the new album cover and title simply mimic decades-old critiques of the suburbs as too confining for rock music. Does the album contribute anything new or unique about suburban life? The profile of the band suggests the members had a pretty good family life with plenty of ongoing family support plus good educations. Were the suburbs really that bad or is this a simple way to show the band is turning away from the stereotypical clean, comformist, and dull suburbs? If so, they are in a long line of writers, artists, filmmakers, and musicians.

Why is Chicago building a new roadway between the Loop and Chinatown?

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The Chicago Tribune presented this headline yesterday: “Mayor proposes new roadway between downtown, Chinatown.” When I first saw this, I thought this might be something along the lines of the Crosstown Expressway, a major new arterial roadway connecting two areas. However, the article seems to emphasize the importance of safety:

The $62 million project, called the Wells-Wentworth Connector, would also realign Wentworth Avenue between Archer and Cermak roads to bring this section of Wentworth in line with the portion of Wentworth south of Cermak, according to the Chicago Department of Transportation.

The Wentworth-Cermak intersection, which jogs in an offset alignment, contributes to a high number of crashes, according to a city analysis…

In Chinatown, the southern end of the new arterial road would offer access to the Dan Ryan Expressway, according to the city’s Central Area Action Plan, a list of proposals and specific projects, along with their construction timetables and estimated costs…

The city has slowly been planning improvements for more than a decade to boost safety and reduce traffic congestion in the area, especially among vehicles exiting the Ryan ramps at Cermak. In April 2008, a semitrailer truck that had just exited the Ryan barreled through a crowded intersection and slammed into the Cermak-Chinatown station, killing two people and injuring 21.

Improving a dangerous intersection, particularly in a higher-pedestrian area, would be helpful. It sounds like Wells and Wentworth could be connected between Roosevelt and 18th Street, providing another north-south route. Yet, the city’s explanation of the rationales for this change hint at another important factor:

1. Improved safety for vehicles, pedestrians and bicyclists. Within a wide study area, the offset intersection at Wentworth and Cermak had the highest number of crashes of any other intersection. In comparison, the number was almost double the number of crashes occuring at the intersection of the Dan Ryan off-ramps with Cermak. The realignment of Wentworth at Cermak is required to facilitate safer connections for all modes of traffic.

2. Construction of a new north-south collector street (Wells Wentworth) . This will allow for improved traffic flow throughout both TIF Redevelopment Areas by creating a coordinated series of intersections, as well as provide or improve pedestrian connectivity within the two project areas and to nearby destinations such as the new Ping Tom Park Fieldhouse, the proposed new Chinatown Library, the existing commercial areas, and transit stops.

3. Significant redevelopment opportunities. Improved connectivity between the Loop, the two TIF Redevelopment Areas, and the surrounding communities will promote the redevelopment of vacant land and expand economic development opportunites.

So the real reason may not be safety or providing another north-south thoroughfare to help relieve traffic. The primary reason, as it often is with urban changes, is development which means money and profits. Safety is good but safety plus new developments that bring in new money are even better. There is money to be made with a new street.

US homeownership rate drops in first quarter of 2014

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The homeownership rate in the United States dropped again in the beginning of 2014:

The homeownership rate in the U.S. declined to the lowest in almost 19 years as rising property prices and mortgage rates held back demand.

The share of Americans who own their homes was 64.8 percent in the first quarter, down from 65.2 percent in the previous three months, the Census Bureau said in a report today. The rate is the lowest since the second quarter of 1995, when it was 64.7 percent…

“The homeownership rate is held back by slow job growth, tight mortgage credit and declining affordability,” Jed Kolko, chief economist of San Francisco-based property-listing service Trulia Inc., said in an interview before the report was released. “We’ll see it stay around this level for some time.”

Sam Zell, chairman of apartment landlord Equity Residential (EQR), said yesterday that the rate will fall to as low as 55 percent because more Americans are choosing to rent as they postpone getting married and having children. As of 2010, about 54 percent of adults were married, down from 57 percent a decade earlier, according to Census Bureau data.

Interesting to hear economists and those in real estate suggest there are a variety of social factors affecting homeownership. Beyond the troubles of the housing market, the issues include family formation and possibly different preferences among younger Americans for where they want to live and how they want to do it.

Another interesting tidbit from this article: the homeownership peak was June 2004. This predates the housing crash by several years and is now almost 10 years ago.